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By the time I’d chewed it soft enough to blow a good bubble, there wasn’t any sweetness left in the gum. Probably that was metaphorical for something. I didn’t know what. Or how to figure out what.
The same way a child mispronouncing a word can be cute, whereas a child mispronouncing a word to be cute annoys, a lisping woman can be very sexy, whereas a woman who lisps to be sexy repels, and I feared that my inadvertent certain something, like the child’s cuteness or the woman’s sexiness, might be one of those qualities self-consciousness could ruin, or (put another way) one of those behaviors, like the child’s mispronouncing or the woman’s lisping, that, in order to produce its desired effect, must not seem deliberate, i.e. had to seem, and perhaps had to be, inadvertent. In short, I
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How could I possibly be such a fool when all that I ever seemed to do was think?
This whole speculative history of common things we don’t usually consider. I was thinking, just yesterday, about bubblegum, how it might have come about.
Either I was bad at being in the world or the world was bad at having me in it. I didn’t know which, but it didn’t really matter. Or maybe it did. It was hard to explain. I couldn’t explain it.
If your BOTIMAL® stays to a strict diet of LifePellets®, it will, unless it gets something smelly on its skin or velvet, give off a faint odor of grape-flavored bubblegum.
What’s more, he was very open with his feelings, demonstrative even—a warm and frequent hugger and smiler, an habitual praiser of apparel and haircuts.
Instead of using these amazing little tools ourselves to do something new—and that’s what a Curio is, right? that’s what any machine is, no matter how complex, right? a tool?—instead of using them to do something new that could expand us, as humans, to expand what it means to be a human, or to think more clearly about what it really means, we let them be used on us. By corporations. Aided by the media. By people who want to sell us formulae, accoutrements. And we have no idea the opportunities we’re blowing to get past what we think are our limits.
Maybe Trip was less an artist than a salesman. But what would that have made me?
They think they want machines that behave as though alive, but what they want are living beings that behave like machines.
